Sunday - January 16, 2005
Life at Sea, Part 2: Dining on the QE2
The Princess Grill, which is our assigned dining room on the QE2, is an excellent restaurant, offering wonderful food, excellent service, and a more intimate dining experience than some of the other dining rooms on board.
After two weeks at sea, I can see that we are going to have to pace ourselves or we will need to be rolled off the ship when we get back to New York. There are so many opportunities to eat on board, that one can really pack on the pounds without half trying. The day begins with breakfast, that is barely cleared away by the time lunch begins, and then there is the English afternoon tea, followed by dinner, and the day ends with the midnight buffet. On top of all this, there is always fruit in our room and one can order from room service 24 hours a day! So far, we have shown discretion by normally having a very light breakfast, a light lunch, and a normal dinner, with very few visits to afternoon tea and none to the midnight buffet. As a matter of fact, those who know us well will be shocked to learn that we have been in bed almost every night before the buffet even begins!
The food we have eaten in the Grill has been excellent, right across the board. Last night, for instance, we had a chateaubriand that simply melted in your mouth. The dishes are inventive and tasty and one is spoiled for choice in all courses. You are given the dinner menu to peruse at lunch (maybe to help you pace yourself), and today, for instance, we saw four different main courses that interested us. The beef has been as good as I have had anywhere, and we have also had some wonderful lamb and fish dinners as well. The desserts are extremely tempting and I have broken down from the usual sorbet to have crepes suzette and cherries jubilee, but how can one pass up those dishes? It's not as though I usually whip up something like that at home. Of course, they have an excellent wine list to accompany all these great meals, and we have been limiting ourselves to a half bottle with each dinner. But even at that rate, the bar bill is quickly adding up.
The wait staff in the Grill come from all over the world. We have spoken with staff who come from India, Great Britain, and Malaysia, and our wine steward, Linda, is from Romania. Our waiter, Marius, told us there are only 4 Lithuanians on the ship, and he and the other wine steward, Linas, are two of them. Our other waiter is a young fellow named Jon who comes from Perth, Scotland. And the Candy Man, as he calls himself, a funny young man who brings around cookies and chocolates to have with your coffee, is from South Africa. This crew is fun to watch at work because it is like watching a professional dance corps - they glide past each other, knowing exactly what to do next to give you the best service possible. They can simultaneously take an order at one table, serve the food at another, and clear an empty table, without you ever seeing the bare table top, and have it completely reset in a matter of minutes - and they do it all without obvious effort on their parts.
At first I wondered if we would get tired of the food, and although it is really too soon to tell, the variety we are offered of really tempting dishes leads me to believe that we will have to keep up our guard all the way around the world!